Inside Watergate — the building
The structure behind the scandal. Book review.
Every political scandal of the past 45 years, be it significant or picayune, has worn the suffix “-gate,” emblematic of the greatest scandal of our time — Watergate.
But after all the time and hype, most of the details of Watergate have faded into a historical haze. So much so that most Americans have forgotten that Watergate is an actual place, a six-building complex of apartments and offices on the west side of Washington.
When construction was finished in the mid-1960s, the Watergate complex was one of the most desirable addresses in greater Washington. After so many Washingtonians had fled the city for the suburbs, the beautiful people of the nation’s capital gravitated back toward architect Luigi Moretti’s new swirling concrete complex.
Despite its designers’ claims, the Watergate was no Shangri-La. A mass of concrete near the banks of the Potomac River, the Watergate apartments featured low ceilings and dodgy heating and air conditioning, as well as the view across the street to the déclassé Howard Johnson Motor Lodge.
As author Joseph Rodota shows in his excellent new book The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address (William Morrow, 432 pp.,
eeeg), life in the Watergate didn’t always match the hype of its developers, although the intrigue inside often outstripped anyone’s imagination.
Rodota, an author, political consultant and veteran of Republican administrations in Washington and Sacramento, captures the absurdity of some of the Watergate’s most notorious residents, starting with Anna Chennault, the Chinese-born wife of one of World War II’s most iconic leaders, Gen. Claire Chennault, leader of the Flying Tigers air unit.
It was Anna Chennault, then working for Republican Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, who helped sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks. She acted as a go-between for Nixon to the South Vietnamese government, telling officials not to agree to Lyndon Johnson’s deal to attend the talks that would end the war in Vietnam. Nixon, Chennault told the South Vietnamese, would give them a better deal. They stayed home; the peace talks failed; South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975.
Soon after Nixon won the 1968 election, Chennault was joined at the Watergate by John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager and his new attorney general. There Mitchell lived with his erratic wife, Martha, whose ravings would draw attention as Mitchell became mired in the Watergate scandal.
Mitchell sunk into trouble on June 17, 1972, when five burglars affiliated with Nixon’s re-election campaign, which Mitchell ran, were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building. The subsequent cover-up of the White House’s involvement in the break-in eventually would backfire on Nixon and cost him the presidency.
That event, along with residents such as Chennault, made the Watergate notorious. Rodota goes further than the scandal, taking readers inside the hulking buildings to show the people and characters inside.